The Colonization And Contributions Of Emmigrants Brought To Southeastern North Carolina By Hugh Macrae

Just after the turn of the century the late Hugh MacRae, a financier, real estate operator, and agricultural-minded citizen of Wilmington, North Carolina, decided farming practices and methods in North Carolina could be improved, particularly in the Southeastern area centered by Wilmington. He sought personally to bring about an improvement by importing European farmers or those recently migrated to the United States to the Southeastern region to introduce their specialized methods of intensive farming. Observers have lauded MacRae's colonies as highly successful -- colonies located in a wilderness of waste land whose inhabitants, by application of modern scientific methods, have made the "wilderness blossom and bear fruit and food products a hundred-fold!" But no scholarly examination of the colonies as a whole and their contributions has been made.